About twenty years ago, and some more, I arrived to Utrecht and to this house were we live. The house by the Juliana Park.
C. called to my office in Basel and her voice in my ear said “Inti, I have found a house” So I took the last train that night, and the next day we walked into our street and I said nothing. I did not like what I saw and I wonder about her happiness in the phone. I could only see a row of houses, all the same drab squares, a perfect stage for a Ken Loach film. But we did get into one of the houses, and crossed the empty rooms and the narrow kitchen and got to the garden. There was a green wall behind, there were trees that made me think in Caracas, there were, they are! the trees of the Juliana Park. And so I smiled, and so I am here twenty (and some more) years after.
Tuesdays and thursdays I walk to my fencing training. I feel a bit silly and a bit fancy, since I wear a traditional samurai hakama with a keikogi, and I cross the streets of Utrecht, and I cross the Juliana Park. Crossing it I reach the big open field, and I feel a bit less silly, since the tuesday’s and the thursday there are groups learning to box, groups of mostly young women fighting there, just practicing what they like, just like I do. I see the ladies half way their university masters, or about to start their first job, the ladies regaining agency after a first pregnancy, or maintaining agency in the middle of a ongoing relation. And some look at me and smile at my clothes and at my katana (in a bag) across my back, and I smile back at their gloves and their shiny silky boxing trunk, and I walk on, and they box on.
And twenty or fifty meters away, at the benches that sourround the field, the homeless and the jobless gather too, to share some beers and roll a joint when they have it. As much as I do, they are looking at the boxing girls, and as much as them they look at me, and comment on my clothes and now and then they stop me for a chat and we chat, and I tell them about budo and they tell me about the park, and their beer, and their joint. Now and then there is no mutual wish to talk, but they still raise a hand and greet me passing by, and I greet them back, and I let them drink and they let me walk, to my training.
Twenty years ago, and few more, I walked my son to sleep in this park. And then my mother walked him and I stayed home and wrote my PhD thesis. And then I walked in with him and his friends and girlfriends, till he needed no parent no more to come to this, or any other park. And I kept running here, and walking, and now and then thinking. I see the mothers, and the fathers, and the lovers, and their kids and the students, and the homeless. And I have talked to some, and they have talked back.
Another window, then.